fetish website review:

Shadowplayers

www.shadowplayers.com is a high quality fetish website run by Master Ray (Ray Ryder). Here women undergo a wide range of bondage and bdsm experiences, and the website is full of powerful fetish images. Special mention must be made of the wonderful and beautiful ponygirls (yummy!), for which Shadowplayers is justly famous.

history of Shadowplayers

Shadowplayers contains a massive amount of original bondage and fetish material, and a wide range in fetish tastes is represented - although most if it includes bondage in one form or another. The website first went online in 2000, at which time it was based in Florida. Later it moved to Arizona. One of the noteworthy features is the extensive use of dramatic outdoor locations, and Master Ray says location shooting will continue all over the Western US (and elsewhere when possible, like the Paris trip).

Most of the material is in the form of pictures, but there are also video clips that can be downloaded onto your hard drive. These clips are not archived, so if you want to collect them all you will be advised to maintain your membership. Each clip is removed from the website after it has been available for 6 weeks, but at any one time there is a good selection of videoclips available, and the selection is constantly changing due to the addition of new material.

fetish content

This website has a broad range of fetish material, including bondage, pain, fetish footwear (ballet boots), femdom of women, girl girl sex (often with bondage), pony girls (including dressage training, and pulling pony carts under discipline), fetish wear to full nudity, explicit genitalia shots, inserted dildos, piercings (tongue, nose and labia), hoods, cocksucking (with and without bondage), facial cumshots, naked slave labour, naked towed behind a vehicle, subservience, boot licking, forced urine drinking, religious fetish images, and suspension (including upside down). And no doubt more that I missed, or yet to come!

high quality pictures and outdoor locations

Master Ray provides his photos at high resolution and quality. In general, high resolution and low compression on images tend to cause relatively large file sizes, and all webmasters have to decide where to strike a balance between picture size and quality, on the one hand, and file size on the other hand. Master Ray is aiming to supply high quality images, and he has even posted a small warning message to this effect on his website. It says that some members with slow internet connections might find his pictures slow to download, but they are worth the wait, because they are so good. I agree.

Personally, I think most members will be very pleased with the balance that Master Ray strikes between quality and file size. Some of these images include very beautiful scenery, and the quality really shows through without the file sizes being at all excessive (in my view).

Incidentally, (and if anyone is interested!) the properties of the jpeg compression algorithm are such that pictures of complex things take up more file space than pictures of simple things, all else being equal. Does that make sense? What I mean is, that if you compress two pictures by the same compression factor, and both pictures have the same (pixel by pixel) dimensions, the picture that includes the most detail will need a larger file size. For example, a picture of a forest will require a larger file size than a picture of a white wall. This is because the latter contains larger areas of nearly matching colours and shades. For this reason, pictures that include beautiful scenery will usually be slower to download than ths studio pictures.

Many of Master Ray's pictures include lovely forest and desert scenes, or impressive views of the Grand Canyon, and I was surprised that some of these pictures do not have larger file sizes given their high quality. I think Master Ray has struck an excellent balance.

bondage

The bondage here includes a very wide variety of bondage paraphanalia. These include ropes, cuffs, chains, single sleeves, fetish shoes, pony harness and trap... etc, etc. The list goes on.

BDSM and pain

I would not personally describe Shadowplayers as a pain site, althouth it does include pain. In my judgement the pain, when it is administered, is light to medium in intensity - although it can be hard to judge from a distance of course! There is a profusion of clamps applied pretty well everywhere on the (female) body, but mainly on nipples and labia. There are beatings and whippings that I would describe as mild to moderate, and some colourful hot wax sequences. In addition to this, some of the bondage looks pretty uncomfortable, such as some of the positions that require much of a model's weight to be supported on a bar or pole between her legs.

ponygirls

One of my personal favourite fetish images is that of the ponyirl. I love to see the almost naked women fastened in their harness, with a bit between their teeth, forced to do dressage, or prance for the pleasure of their Masters! I especially love it when they are secured to a pony cart, and forced to pull it under threat of the whip. Most likely anyone with an interest in ponygirls will have come across some of Master Ray's images at some time. I was truly delighted to discover that Master Ray's stable of ponygirls includes two black fillies (is that the right word?) named Erika and Colette.

Although ponygirls look good in still photographs, you really need a moving image to appreciate them properly. Master Ray provides video clips of his ponygirls being put through their paces. For example, there are sequences in which a young ponygirl, naked except for her harness and bit, is required (at the end of a whip) to pull Master Ray on a cart along a stony desert track. In her bare feet. Ouch. (I should add that the ponygirls often have shoes or boots of various types to protect their feet - or is it to add to the fetish imagery?)

ebony models

Many of my members will be interested to know that Master Ray uses Ebony models. In the thumbnails below you can see Colette and Erika shackled into their ponygirl harnesses (full size images are available in the members area of Ebony Bondage). I am sure you will agree they both look wonderful! It is very rare to see black ponygirls being pranced through their paces! They can also be seen in "more conventional" bondage situations of course.